“towering grandeur of her genius”: Walt Whitman, “About Acting,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 14, 1846.
“Saw Charlotte Cushman and had a stage-struck fit”: Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, Massachusetts: Roberts Brothers, 1892), 99.
“that these dead shall not have died in vain”: Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” Nicolay copy, Library of Congress, 1863.
“incarnate power”: William Winter, Other Days (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1908), 152–53, quoted in Sharon Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 45.
chaper one: The First Disaster
“The effect of democracy”: Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America: Complete and Unabridged Volumes I and II (New York: Random House, 2004), 752, originally published in 1835.
America was considered a “vulgar” nation: Ibid., 183. He calls Americans vulgar no less than thirteen times. Also see Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832); Charles Dickens, American Notes (1850). Also Simon Linguet (1780) quoted in Barry Rubin and Judith Kolp Rubin, Hating America, A History (London: Oxford University Press, 2004), 23.
“a good singer, a good scholar”: Henry Wyles Cushman, “Genealogy of the Cushmans,” Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
“The seasons turned backward”: Vermont, a Guide to the Green Mountain State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), written by workers of the Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration for the State of Vermont, 31.
some argued the crisis was caused by deforestation http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/john-l-sullivan-americas-first-superstar-athlete/.
“our philosophy e’er dreamt on”: Quoted in The Reporter (Brattleboro, VT), July 17, 1816, six days before Charlotte Cushman’s birth.
“Climbing trees was an absolute passion”: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 13.
“tomboy”: Ibid.
“child-brother”: Ibid., 183.
“keener, more artistic, more impulsive”: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 183.
“tyrannical” to her siblings: Ibid, 14.
“first disaster”: Charlotte Cushman to Emma Crow Cushman, Rome, May 21, 1861, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
nervous exhaustion: “The Influence of Railway Traveling on Public Health,” Lancet, January 4, 1862.
chapter two: Quest
“that dark, horrible, guilty ‘third tier’ ”: Claudia D. Johnson, “That Guilty Third Tier: Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century American Theaters,” American Quarterly 27, no. 5, Special Issue: Victorian Culture in America (December 1975): 575–84.
“Pastors, deacons, church members”: Charles Upham, Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1867).
“assumed the actors must be depraved”: Meredith Bartron, “The Tenter-Hooks of Temptation: The Debate over Theatre in Post-Revolutionary America,” Gettysburg Historical Journal 2, article 8 (2003).
The theatre’s marble facade shone creamy white: Phillip Harry, Tremont Theatre 1843 (Painting), Oil on Panel, 34.92 x 40.96 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
“seemed a man of quick, irritable feelings”: Frances Williams-Wynn, Diaries of a Lady of Quality (London: Longman Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864), 288.
families in the pit: Lawrence Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Copyright © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The ladies glinted like constellations: Charlotte Cushman to Unknown, Walnut St. Theatre, January 1, 1842, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
Throughout Charlotte’s audition Mrs. Wood was quiet: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 20.
“that such a voice, properly cultivated”: Ibid.
chapter three: Transformation
The water of the Mississippi: Walt Whitman, “Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, March 6, 1848.
“the dwellings would speedily disappear”: Francis Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Oxford University Press, 2014), originally published 1832.
Near the St. James was the fashionable Esplanade Avenue: City descriptions from maps of nineteenth-century New Orleans at the Library of Congress.
four-thousand-seat auditorium: New Orleans Bee, December 1, 1835, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers. Manuscript/Mixed Material.
The walls and ceiling were brightly painted: Nellie Kroger Smither, A History of the English Theatre in New Orleans (New York: B. Blom, 1967).
struggled to fill the cavernous space: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 22.
“The worst Countess we have had the honor of seeing”: New Orleans Bee, December 4, 1835, quoted in Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 28.
“Miss Cushman can sing nothing”: New Orleans Bee, April 12, 1836, quoted in ibid., 28.
“bearable”: Quoted in Joseph Leach, Bright Particular Star: The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman (Boston: Yale University Press, 1970).
Her tone was now “aspirated”: James Murdoch, The Stage, 1880, quoted in The Cambridge Handbook to American Theatre, 237.
“Never fell in love with a lord”: Olive Logan, Before the Footlights and Behind the Stage (Philadelphia: Parmlee & Co, 1870), 133.
“I went on with tolerable composure”: Horace Howard Furness, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Vol II, Macbeth (Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincot & Co., 1873), 415–25.
“fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile”: Ibid.
“pythoness”: “Miss Cushman as Meg Merrilies,” New York Times, January 23, 1887. She was called pythonic many times throughout her career.
At night she climbed up to the garret of the house: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman.
“a couple of begrimed men in shirt-sleeves”: Logan, Before the Footlights, 72.
short, fat, and four-foot-ten-inches tall: Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman, 22–23.
“was almost insane on the subject”: Maeder, quoted in Price, A Life of Charlotte Cushman, 16–17.
“She made the people understand the character that Shakespeare drew”: Waters, Charlotte Cushman, 5.
“the Slaughterhouse”: Thomas Bogar, Thomas Hamblin and the Bowery Theatre: The New York Reign of “Blood and Thunder” Melodramas (New York: Springer, 2017), 3.
chapter four: The Star of the Bowery
“tremendous pop as of a colossal champagne-cork”: Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1913), 317.
“like pictures on the wall”: Firsthand descriptions of rail travel from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 52–56.
“train-induced fatigue”: Ibid., 58, quoting The Lancet.
“howl like a dog”: Ibid.
men in dark suits with worried expressions: Financial panic began at the end of 1836.
“as if he could clutch almost anything in his talons”: Lydia Marie Child, quoted in Bogar, Thomas Hamblin, 83.
charred mass stretching seventeen blocks: Herbert Asbury, “The Great Fire of 1831,” New Yorker, July 26, 1930.
Copper roofs poured down themselves: Eliza Leslie, “Gleanings and Recollections: No 1, The New York Fire,”
